CASE - Creativity, Arts and Science in primary Education

Creativity, Arts and Science in primary Education (CASE) project will contribute to teachers' professional development and to the development and sustainability of creativity of young people and propose creative pedagogies. Embedded within this is the vitally important notion that young people are creating wisely and humanely, and that cyclical development occurs between their creativity and their identity. As they generate new ideas; this in turn generates change in them as ‘makers’; they are also developing or ‘becoming’ themselves. Slowly, small changes accumulate to contribute to ‘journeys of becoming’. These individual journeys accumulate together, embedded within an ethical awareness of the impact of creative actions on the group.

The main targets of CASE project are:

design and develop training materials aimed at training of primary teachers. These will include user-friendly manuals, guidelines, learning scenarios, open educational resources and social-media tools available on the project’s web platform.

implement a wide-spread training approach for teachers, facilitating intake of creative Inquiry Based Science Education practices in primary schools. The project will realize numerous international mobility activities for primary teachers.

validate and evaluate the project’s approach.

provide guidelines for continued communication and exploitation of results by the primary education community.

The project is based on 3 main categories and 4 specifc cases:

Learning Science Through Theater: Students will perform theatrically a story related to scientific themes and will learn science in a creative way. This case promotes the comprehension of scientific concepts and phenomena, development of a spirit of cooperation and teamwork and the development of creative and critical thinking skills. The specific objectives of the activity have as a central axis the interdisciplinary connection of science with aspects of art, aiming at the enhancement of students’ interest in science.

Learning Science Through Puppetry:In this case, inquiry-based science education will be combined with puppetry. In every activity, a puppetry story will be played by the teacher. In this story the puppets have a problem or a question. This will arouse children’s curiosity, which instantly will stimulate them to discover. Children will help the puppets to find a solution or answer. All activities will be challenging tasks in the field of STEAM education and every process can have many different results. Children will research like scientists and design like artists.

Digital Narratives: This activity aims to transform science presented in curricula (usually strict, stiff and boring for young people) to open, friendly and interactive communication supported by the re-contextualization of science content in digital narratives created by learners. In order to do that a simple animation technique is used called slowmation: a slow and simple animation using only 2 photos per seconds. Slowmation movies are created in a creative learning environment where science concepts meet with art, music, literacy, society, history and philosophy of science. The developed digital narratives highlight and present the abstract science concepts and theories in a creative and original way. Furthermore, the presentation of the developed digital narratives on the web provides a meeting place for learning and cooperation between young people.

Digital Storytelling: The overall concept of the digital storytelling case is to provide the means and the tools along with the necessary collaborative and personalisation functionalities to introduce students in extended episodes of deeper learning in STEM combined with Art-related activities (visual and performing arts, music, movie making, 3D design). The specific case will introduce students in a progressive exploration of the different technologies that can be accommodated from the provided system, from simple text and video uploading to advanced augmentations of students’ artifacts.